


Begin Somewhere

by uglowian



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Community: no_tags, F/M, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Past Drug Addiction, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 21:23:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13935696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uglowian/pseuds/uglowian
Summary: For no_tags 2018. Prompt 9: Ray Toro/Pete Wentz, bass lessons.MCR wrote an album after Conventional Weapons. Fall Out Boy needs a co-headliner. Ray never knew very much about Pete Wentz before all this.





	Begin Somewhere

Ray doesn't talk to Pete all that much, not that first summer. He supposes there's some vague resentment behind that; seeing him hang all over Mikey. Seeing Mikey, drunk on the heat of too many dehydrated evenings, touching Pete's mouth while they walked off to…whatever.

It's not like Ray is Mikey's _actual_ big brother, and it's not like he's trying to be—it's not like he's got more business being worried about Mikey than Gerard does. But worry is in his nature, he'll admit. And Gerard said it first: _Mikey's everyone's kid brother_. It's true, Ray realizes, as soon as the words are out of Gerard's mouth. It's true, and it was true from the first moment he sat in a basement that smelled of musty carpeting and showed Mikey (not for the last time) how to tune his borrowed bass. It would never stop being true, after that.

Ray doesn't talk to Pete that much that summer, but he sees Pete with Mikey and his heart squeezes out a sour feeling and he catches himself thinking _don't hurt him_ while they wander, arms around each others' waists, into the dark.

He knows it's a wishful thing to think. Hurting is inevitable, where Mikey's concerned—and where Pete's concerned too. Ray's starting to realize that. By the end of that baked-blue summer, they'll both be eggshell thin. Two boys, made for hurting. It's not Mikey's fault, really.

And if that's true, Ray has to cede: it isn't Pete's fault either.

*

"I can't do it."

Mikey cradles his bass in his lap. The house is so much bigger and brighter than Ray expected, for all the talk of it being haunted. Someone ran through here, however many years ago, and splashed color everywhere—maybe to keep the ghosts out. But looking at Mikey all hunched over his bass, Ray thinks that ghosts probably don't care about color anymore than they care about walls, or doors, or human fear.

"I can't," Mikey mumbles.

He might mean this, right now, the line they're trying to track. He does, sometimes. Think he can't, or think that he isn't good enough, not _talented_ enough—or whatever any other shit-schilling wannabe critic has written about him, all while comparing him to his brother in the same breath. Or throwing him in Ray's shadow, if they're feeling generous about Ray.

So yes, his _I can't_ might mean all those things, but the afternoon's slopping gold through the high windows, and Mikey won't look at him. He's looking, instead, at some fixed point that Ray can't see beyond the panes of glass, and dust motes catch in a stream between them, inimitable and galactic, and Ray knows that this is something else. His heart's already bleeding in his chest.

"Mikes—"

Mikey shakes his head, looking for all the world like he's about to cry. "I just want to stop for a while."

Ray sets his guitar aside, picks his way over cables, pedals, and tangles of whatever other equipment they're not quite using, and slides to sitting on the floor, right at Mikey's side. When he gets his arm around Mikey's shoulders, the bones of them dig into soft tissue. He's so sharp. Sharp and brittle and too breakable. His breath shivers at Ray's touch.

"Did you tell Gerard?" Ray coaxes.

Mikey shakes his head. "I mean. I will, I just—"

The words get lost, foundering on something that started hurting a long time ago and still hasn't stopped. Ray gets his other arm around Mikey, too. He pulls him close and holds him tight while the sun goes down.

Mikey does tell Gerard, in the end, and it's a miserable telling. He tells Gerard and then he tells the rest of them, all together, and Ray has to sit in this fucking awful house and pretend he didn't hear it once already, and that it doesn't hurt more to hear it the second time. 

"I can't do it," Mikey says again, all-consumed by this reality. "I can't do it, and I don't want…I can't make it not happen for everyone else."

Not a one of them, not Frank, not Bob, not Ray, and not even Gerard tells him that there's nothing he could do to break up the band, or that if their band breaks up, it'll be because they all signed on to something stupid, they didn't know what they were getting into, they're going crazy in a house that's haunted the way publicity stunts feel like hauntings and because, even at his best, Gerard gets lost sometimes, dashing up the towers of his own fantasies, leaving the rest of them on the ground to wonder which stars, exactly, he's trying to catch. 

"I'm sorry," Mikey breathes.

Ray knows that light and optics don't really work this way, but when Mikey leaves, the car that takes him away dissolves into heatshimmers off the drive. There's nothing but the hissing dazzle of late August in all its smoggy languor.

After that, Bob cuts out of a recording session in a bad mood, snapping that he'd rather spend all day in Patrick Stump's filth-hovel than he would here, writing shit that's going nowhere. Frank just growls at his back.

And Gerard?

Finds Ray at three in the morning, one week later. He hasn't been sleeping, Ray knows that much. It's starting to show. Out in the back yard of this awful house, there's a pool that someone comes to clean once a week, glowing acid blue. No one ever figured out how to turn off the lights that come on at night, and by now it seems like there's no point in asking any of the intermittently present groundskeepers. Ray sits with his feet in the water, feeling the chill up to his ankles, and wondering whose fault it'll be when the center finally can't hold. Or when the house eats them alive. 

"Hey?"

The breeze cools Ray's cheeks and he looks up at the sound of Gerard's voice. Bare feet whisper on the flagstone, until Gerard crouches to sit beside him. He's got one of the acoustic Taylors in his arms, its body huge and hollow against his torso. The pool laps at Ray's ankles and its sickish ultramarine glow slides over Gerard's face, turning his mouth a crepuscular, purpling color.

"Hey," Ray agrees.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Me either." 

Gerard's dark hair whispers against his jaw. Sometimes Ray's struck by how similar he and Mikey are; other times—like now—the ways in which they're different overshadow everything else. Gerard sighs, thrumming the strings on the guitar. He's not crying yet, but a clear grief runs off his eyes anyway. Midnight insects hiss in the very neatly cultivated trees.

"I have to play something for you," Gerard breathes.

"By all means." Ray musters a smile. "I've got all night."

It isn't very funny and Gerard doesn't laugh, and what he plays for Ray isn't funny either—but Ray can work with it. It takes him a few days; the melody has to sink into his blood. He has to feel it out. But it comes around in a little over a week. He can pick up the bare bones of it, and build an armature, melody and beat and rhythm and all. 

It's always strange how easy it is to match the living bassline to someone else's heartbreak.

*

The center holds. The house doesn't eat them alive. Two months later, they have an album that they paid for in a pound of proverbial flesh, and five months after that, in what feels like the most heartless decision of the year, Mikey marries Alicia without warning.

Ray wonders once or twice if misogyny got the better of him. He spent a whole fucking summer worried that a boy was going to hurt Mikey—and now he can't not worry that Mikey's going to hurt a girl. That feels weirdly shitty, or somehow unfairly gendered. 

Or maybe he just remembers what came for them after that dusty summer.

Mikey, unlike every other drunk Ray's ever known, always gets quieter and stiffer when he's under. And he was so far under that night, while the fireworks bedazzled the velvet night. Gerard's sobriety notwithstanding, Mikey appeared to have taken up tequila-soaked misery enough for both of them. Ray or Gerard probably should have stopped him two hours ago. 

There were probably a lot of things they should have stopped.

"We never fucked," Mikey told him without preamble, a roman candle screaming up into the sky.

Not too many paces away, Pete hovered next to Patrick and Bob, punching Patrick's shoulder for a reason that wasn't obvious to Ray. Maybe just because he liked touching Patrick. Ray would believe that. Whatever the reason, Pete wasn't looking at them. He hadn't been looking at them all night.

The firework blew out its sound and its sparkles, and Mikey dazzled a little in the fairydust fallout. He gripped his solo cup.

"I never wanted to fuck him. I wouldn't."

Ray never said that not one of those three things had anything to do with the other two of those three things, and he never said that he, and everyone else on that tour, probably, had enough evidence to prove all three of those things a lie. He also didn't say that neither he, nor anyone else, had ever _asked_ what might have happened—not even Gerard—and so there was a whole Lady Macbeth thing happening there that Mikey somehow didn't see.

Ray just took Mikey's cup.

"You should have some water."

Mikey gave him a morose look and more fireworks popped freedom and liberty overhead.

They never talked about it after that. Gerard gave up trying, worn down by the insistence that there wasn't anything to talk about in the first place. Under a peachpink sky, on the first leg of their tour, Gerard flicked a cigarette away and remarked only once on Mikey's upcoming wedding.

"He never talks about Alicia either."

So maybe in the end Ray's right to be worried, for all the difference it makes.

The tour moves like a whirlwind—through the country, across continents, and through their lives. He forgets there's an outside world for a little while, but that's just the way it goes. He isn't planning on listening to Infinity On High, truth be told. And if even truer truths be told, he had forgotten that the album even dropped—and Bob _lived_ with their fucking vocalist for the entire recording. 

Touring does that to you, maybe. 

So he forgot, but Bob reminds him because, Bob, as mentioned, lived with Patrick Stump for most of that whole miserable year. Specifically, he drops his ipod on Ray's chest on a walk from the bunks to the bus kitchenette.

"Have you listened to this shit yet?"

Ray kicks at him, annoyed, because he's in the way of the TV. "Dude—"

"No, _you_ , dude. I'm telling you: listen."

"To what?"

Bob just goes for the minifridge, ipod abandoned on Ray's chest. "Pete Wentz's latest showing for all the teenaged girls."

"I'm pretty sure _our_ audience is mostly teenaged girls."

"Whatever. Just listen to it. If I die in a freak accident, you need to promise me you'll hawk Hurley from those guys to take my place."

Ray makes a disinterested noise, but he does pick up the ipod. When he taps it to life, the little screen blinks _Thriller_ at him. He has to go digging back through the bunks to find an actual set of headphones—Bob wasn't that generous. 

Bob was also right. The music isn't really Ray's scene, but it hits him like a truck anyway. The rest of the band should hold on to Andy Hurley for dear life, that much is obvious. Also obvious: Pete Wentz. Not really as a bassist, just as a person. Or a lyricist.

Ray gets halfway through the album before he has to pause, a seasick feeling slopping around in his gut. Looking at the ceiling of his bunk, he wonders what he'd do if Gerard gave him lyrics like this and asked him to make music out of them. Or if Mikey did, as the case may be. Assuming Mikey were inclined to give any of them anything at all. 

He clicks the ipod back to life.

He finds himself chasing the bassline through the last of the tracks, hooked on the ebb and flow of it, for whatever reason. He doesn't know much about Fall Out Boy's process, and he only has a best guess as to the goals driving their decisions, but he's a little struck by the unrelenting wall of sound, refuting space in most of the songs—and by the somewhat incessant drone of the bass buried in all the chest-thudding crests of everything else. It tugs a sadness to life in Ray's pleural cavity, damp and aspirated from soft tissue.

He still can't claim to know Pete all that well, but there's something in the relentless thrumming that seems to be so very like and so very unlike him all at once. Somehow everpresent, or at least difficult to ignore—that feels correct. But there's a silvered flatness to the sound that Ray wouldn't generally equate to how he understands Pete as a person.

To hear Bob tell it, Patrick has the reins of the band's songwriting operation. That seems plausible, all of a sudden. Listening to Patrick's vocals and Pete's line and the both of them half-swallowed by layers of breathless ambition, it seems like the most plausible thing in the world. Bury your own voice in a ditch of orchestrated chaos, and bury with it the guy who wrote every word you have to sing.

Ray supposes you don't need to find a bassline when you're already wearing someone else's heartbreak on your sleeve.

*

To return to an earlier point: Ray was right about Alicia.

Mikey does hurt her. Quite a bit.

*

"The label thinks it's a good idea."

It's sunny at high noon and Gerard's voice, even when he's delivering news of an emotionally ambiguous nature, lilts in a pretty way. Ray sits with him in the shade where Gerard's house opens up into the backyard's porch. He remarks:

"I know what the label thinks, Gee. What about you?"

Gerard fidgets, long fingers picking aimlessly at the hem of his shirt. It's a tic that used to make Ray nervous and that he has since come to recognize as the promise that Gerard's thinking—or at least that there's something rattling around in his head. Itching its way down to his fingertips and finding shapes beyond his skin. Ray doesn't remember when he started to find it comforting.

"I think…" Gerard sighs, squinting out into the sunshine. "I think it's a good idea. With some caveats."

Ray snorts. " _Some_ caveats?"

It gets him a sidelong look.

"Some," Gerard repeats. "I'm not saying yes if you and Frank and Mikey aren't into it. And we need a touring drummer. Probably a keyboardist too, Dewees has his stuff going on. And if we're doing this, we're doing it right. They're all gonna be stadium venues, I'm not showing up to play softball."

"Sounds like you've got it all worked out."

Gerard kicks softly at his foot. "C'mon. I need my partner in crime to weigh in."

Ray thinks about it. He can see why the label's into it. Conventional Weapons was a quiet album and the tour was small, much to the chagrin of any number of fans, and there were a million and one gossip threads speculating that this was _the end_ for My Chemical Romance. It was very dramatic.

A stadium tour would be a sufficient counterpoint to that. A stadium tour co-headlined with fucking Fall Out Boy would crush it. 

Ray supposes there's something to be said for making a statement.

"So you haven't talked to anyone else?"

Gerard shrugs. A breeze warms the air, and the silence billows and feels damp in spite of the heat. "The managers. Linds."

"But not Frank and Mikey."

"No."

"Anyone else?"

"Anyone else, like Pete?"

"I mean. Just off the top of my head, yeah."

Gerard huffs and shakes his head. "You're a pain in the ass, Toro."

"A pain in the ass that's known you for fifteen years."

It makes Gerard smile, however briefly. Ray watches him look back out to the yard where it's all flooded with sunshine, and he watches the smile fade, and he watches how the breeze tugs Gerard's hair just a little bit.

"Yeah," he answers, softly. "I talked to Pete. He was…happy about it. He said the other guys were, too. Or, verbatim: 'Fuck yeah, we'd be down.'" He gathers his bottom lip up between his teeth. "I told them I'd talk to you."

Truth be told: _fuck yeah_ is kind of how Ray feels too, when he lets himself settle into the idea. If he's being totally honest, and entirely selfish, he has to admit that he _missed_ that kind of touring. There's a thrill to it that they haven't chased Projekt Revolution, and yeah, maybe he's getting too old for this shit or whatever, but sometimes you have to live a little. Or die trying, or whatever. 

But, a bit like Gerard, he has _some_ reservations.

"Are you gonna make me dress up as a Bene Gesserit this time?"

"Fuck you, tell me you wouldn't jump at the chance to be a space-witch."

Ray grins. "I'm down."

And he means it, slight reservations or no. If the stars align, this is gonna be so much fucking fun.

*

Pause on those slight reservations, though

To elaborate on the point of hurting Alicia: Mikey dropped out of the Conventional Weapons tour a third of the way through. Ultimately for the best, even if it felt weird, showing themselves as a band down the entirety of their rhythm section. But they made it work.

What didn't work: the pictures that surfaced of Mikey and Sarah, and Lindsey's vitriol all over Twitter. What extremely didn't work: the pictures that surfaced of Mikey and Sarah and some guy Sarah knew, who managed to remain nameless through the whole shitstorm, while the internet, the father, the son, and the holy ghost all had some kind of collective aneurysm. 

Alicia proceeded with no comment. Mikey landed in rehab a week after the divorce finalized. Gerard confessed to Ray that he thought he might be killing his brother.

In the long run, it was more than just an understated album and a small tour that fueled the hysteria over MCR's imminent breakup.

Ray doesn't quite know what it says about him that his answer to all that was to sit down with Gerard and write another album. Gerard, lying on the studio floor, said it was just because it was easier to turn all truths into a sacrificial rite than it was to look at them straight on. 

They called the album Dead Letters. 

Ray still thinks the implication's a little grim, but no one else seems to pick up on it. Gerard did tell the label it was all about a little girl with a stutter and a leg someone splintered in a car accident and the fairy king that visits her while she's recovering, so maybe that's why. Mikey also showed up to the recording sessions—maybe that's the real reason why.

And after all that agony, Ray can just picture their A&R in a boardroom, telling the rest of the label that things are different now. That this album is fresh and new. That Mikey's better, they're all better, the rest of the world just needs to _know_ they're better. It's a convenient aside that they might also make the label a lot of money.

But this is Ray's life, and he tries not to be too jaded about it. Reprise's bottom line interests aside, he does believe in Gerard, and he believes in his band, and he believes in their fucking album. That's enough.

He doesn't squash the reservations, he just lets them have a tiny plot of space in the back of his mind. He can live with that.

*

This a delegating thing, even though it doesn't have to be.

He talks to Frankie—

"Are you fucking kidding me, dude? I can't wait to not be the shortest guy on stage."

"Frank. You're not going to be on stage _with_ Patrick."

"Never say never, my guy. Tell Gee I'm fucking ready."

—and Gerard talks to Mikey.

If he gets anything more than a 'yes, I'll do it', Gerard doesn't say. Ray trusts that if there had been anything worth remarking upon, Gerard would've brought it up. 

It's a whirlwind after that. Rehearsals and negotiating setlists and booking dates and venues. The inevitable use of pyrotechnics and sparkshowers takes a bit of planning and crosstalk. Frank, meanwhile, gleefully reports that Twitter is, quote, 'going off'. Ray, with a Twitter feed neatly curated to reduce as much white noise as possible, is glad he has someone around to keep him young. They don't see anyone from Fall Out Boy proper, but Gerard spends a lot of time on the phone with Pete, and there are managers who talk to managers, and Frank tries to rope Ray into some kind of betting pool with Joe Trohman that they've creatively titled Magna Cum Loudly. 

Ray rolls his eyes, gets Andy Hurley's number from Gee, and calls to warn him ahead of time that he might be taking refuge on his bus before this tour's over.

Even Mikey cracks a few jokes now and again about being out of practice and how he forgot everything they ever wrote that wasn't this album. _Fucking thanks, rehab_. He smiles after he says it, though, and Ray tugs him close to kiss his cheek. 

And a niggling apprehension slowly goes quiet in Ray's brain. By the time they're actually loading in for soundcheck at their first date in Texas, the excitement in his marrow has him humming with a bright feeling.

It is, as promised, an enormous arena, and actually checking levels and mics is a bitch because of it. None of Fall Out Boy is anywhere in sight, but someone said that had something to do with their flight getting delayed. Ray feels for them, a little. Soundcheck isn't fun on a good day—it sucks to start off stressed on the first fucking night.

Patrick, it would appear, agrees, when they finally do show up halfway through the check, gear and techs and buses in tow. Gerard grins big at the wings of the stage, and Ray catches Andy making a neat little salute out of the corner of his eye. Patrick's down by the pit, though, glaring up at the stage like it's somehow personally responsible for their late arrival. The tour photographers graciously avoid him. 

Ray twangs the opening riff of 'Grand Theft Autumn' at him, just for shits, and Patrick startles. Then grins. 

Ray winks and goes back to work. 

Once everything's all set up, there're a grand total of three minutes for them to hand the stage off to Fall Out Boy—which, of course, they take up with a round of hugs and high fives and _how've you fucking been_ 's. Joe and Patrick are antsy to get things in order, though, and Ray knows how that feels. They shuffle out of each other's way quickly enough that there's really no reason to think all that much about the fact that, in the midst of happy greetings, Pete only smiles faintly at Mikey and that Mikey disappears backstage with nothing more than a nod.

There's no time to think much of it afterwards, either. Soon they're stageside, listening to the huge swell of thousands of kids screaming in the darkness. At his side, Gerard holds his hand up in a 5-4-3-2-1 motion. They jog out together, glo-tape guiding their way in the dark. He can just barely see Frank and Mikey's silhouettes, bluelike against the electric black. The crowd's roar _thunders_.

Ray gets one hand on the neck of his guitar. Splays his fingers on the frets. Behind him, their splash screen echoes his arpeggio with scrambling bands of light, bright enough to limn Gerard from behind.

"Austin," Gerard shouts, "lemme hear you fucking _scream_."

The shrieking shreds its way through Ray's chest. And then the screen blares light behind them and all thought abandons him. 'Thank You For the Venom' has him in its tide.

Frank and Gerard are both limping by the end of their set. No big surprise there—they're not twenty-five anymore but Frank still throws himself around like he is and Gerard still does some kind of unspeakable violence to his whole body, giving himself up to this go-around's stage persona. Maybe to remind the world of their arrival into something approaching middle age, Gerard didn't bother to dye his hair. He's got all two years of untrimmed length tied back in a high ponytail that, at this point, is slipping pretty loose. The veins of silver in all that brown catch the glinting light in the gloom of the wings.

It's mostly a shuffling mess, all techs and Frank shouting that he needs beer and an ice pack, and Gerard grinning like an idiot. He leans in on Ray, hurting, maybe, but radiating something happy. Mikey hands his bass off to his tech, and motions that he's going to shower—and almost walks right into Pete. Time stretches out in that dimly lit moment, Pete staring and Mikey frozen in an aborted reach, halfway to catching Pete's arm.

Out in the stadium it sounds like the crowd is collectively trying to scream itself hoarse. 

In the scramble, Joe appears, grinning big as all get out, and the world snaps itself back into place. He throws one hand up in some kind of gesture that Ray's never seen before, but recognizes as _fuck yeah_. Mikey disappears. 

Pete smiles and pats Ray on the shoulder when he and Gerard pass, going for the stage door. And Jesus Christ, once they're in the hallway, Ray can still hear the screaming through a concrete fucking wall. 

Gerard hangs tight with an arm around his shoulders.

"Maybe try taking it easy tomorrow?" Ray suggests in lieu of remarking on whatever the hell that was back there. Gerard has eyes. And Pete and Mikey are adults.

"No one pays to see us take it easy." Gerard smiles, but the fluorescents deepen the hollows of his eyes, and something about his happiness turns smeary and bruised. "Go big or go home."

Ray squeezes his waist and they walk together down the hall.

*

To be clear, after that whole thing at the barbecue, Ray never asked Mikey about Pete again. And after the whole thing with Sarah and the guy Sarah knew, Ray didn't ask what was starting to feel like a more than incidentally obvious question.

Mikey had bigger shit to deal with, and whatever men he may or may not have wanted to fuck wasn't and still isn't Ray's business. And Mikey never brings it up.

None of that makes it any easier, of course. None of it makes Ray worry any less. Mikey clean and sober is such a good thing, and it hurts to think that, even clean and sober in the year 20fucking15, there's something in Mikey that's somehow too big or too painful or too whatever it might be to talk about.

He watches Mikey and Pete avoid each other; he watches them have awkward run-ins—all broken body language and averted eyes—three more times after that first night. He watches how each of them lights up in the absence of the other. 

It's not that Ray doesn't have anything to say about the whole thing, it's just that he doesn't know how to say it.

*

Things are mostly a blur, all switching off who closes on what night and keeping track of what the fuck they're playing for their encore and riding high on the rush.

Ray feels like he doesn't get a chance to catch up with himself until he's sitting in a sticky diner booth on their first hotel stop in…some state. It's cooler here than Texas, so maybe not the south. In the diner, everything smells like fake butter and greasy grilled cheese, but he likes it. There's something familiar there.

"Only the finest dining for the lead guitarist?"

Ray looks up from his menu just as Joe scoots into the other side of the booth. Ray lifts his mug of coffee in a gentle welcome.

"Obviously."

"Care if I crash the party?"

There's no one else in the booth. "I think I need you to _start_ a party."

Joe's grin is big. He has ink jeweled all up his arms, bright bright bright. It startles Ray's memory of a sweet kid with skin as bare as his own, insisting _no, really, dude, you won't fuck it up_ when he asked Ray to play for him for a few shows on Warped. Ray smiles back, a fondness blooming just behind his sternum. They fall to picking over the menu. Pete appears just as their food arrives, looking a little bit like death. He reaches for Joe's coffee without a word.

"Hello to you too," Joe remarks, swatting at his hand. "What did I tell you about making good choices last night?"

"Fuck off, I was overserved." He smiles thinly at Ray. "Tell your rhythm guitarist I say thanks."

Because of course it was Frank. 

"Tell him yourself, whenever he gets here."

Pete grabs Joe's coffee again and this time Joe just flags down the waitress, requesting another mug for his dearly beloved manchild. They find the shape of easy conversation for a little bit until Patrick stalks up to the booth and takes up the space left next to Ray. Glaring.

Ray opens his mouth to ask what's wrong when the diner door swings open one more time and Mikey appears in the spill of sunlight with Gerard at his side. Patrick's jaw goes tight.

"You good, dude?" Pete asks—but the _dude_ slips and dies on the tail end, just as Mikey walks past, looking drawn and tired and sad. 

Gerard favors Ray with a glance and keeps walking.

"I'm fine," Patrick snaps. 

Pete makes a face, but it's halfhearted. He looks tired.

"Cookie's not a morning person," he tells Ray.

Patrick snatches the menu that Pete obviously isn't using. Joe's mouth twists, and he hides it in his coffee. Ray just shrugs.

It lightens up after that—or Patrick's hackles settle. There's nothing to say about what just happened, so no one bothers to try. They find better things to talk about—Star Wars, and why it's better than Lord of the Rings, Ray's protests notwithstanding—and it feels easy again, the whole diner exhaling.

Ray catches Pete glancing at something past the booth just once. He doesn't need to turn around to see what it is.

*

Living out of the bus is logistically easier, Ray will admit—no unpacking, no dealing with lobby calls, no sorting out who rooms with who—but there's something to be said for showers and the freedom to stretch out on a real bed. He sprawls on his back, paging idly through a set of pages he pulled out of a veritable brick of Gerard's drafts of…something. He hasn't titled the comic book yet; he doesn't even appear to have a _story_ yet. Half the pages are hand-scribbled snippets of a script. The other half just look like character designs and a few very loosely sketched action sequences. There's definitely something humanoid with a complete hammerhead shark for a head. Gerard crossed that one out.

Ray lays the pages over his face, laughing to himself while the quiet soaks into his skin and a soft knock gives him a start.

It's Pete at the door, looking a little bashful.

"Hey, uh. Fuck, did I wake you up?"

It's 10 p.m. "Nah. Just reading."

Pete glances at the papers in Ray's hand and arches one eyebrow.

"Gee's stuff," Ray explains. "He's writing. Something."

"Something?"

"A comic book, or a pitch for a comic book. He gives me the drafts sometimes."

"Does he ever, like. Slow down?"

"Not really, no."

Pete makes a soft, amused sound and then they're just standing there, Pete on one side of the threshold and Ray on the other, and maybe ten years ago, it would have been awkward. Or more awkward—whatever. Ray's coming to accept that awkward is sometimes just the way his life goes. He takes a step back. 

"You wanna come in?"

"Sure. Thanks."

Pete moves like he's a little bit skittish, but settles on one end of the room's very overstuffed couch and tucks his feet up under him. Ray just…sits on the end of his bed.

"I wanted to say sorry," Pete sighs without preamble, rolling his shoulders. "For earlier."

"Earlier?"

"For Patrick being a weirdo."

Ah, the diner. Right. "Hey, it's cool." Ray sets the clutch of papers down. "Like you said, not everyone's a morning person."

"He's not an any time of day person if he's feeling bitchy." 

Ray laughs before he can catch himself. It makes Pete smile. 

"I'm serious, though," Pete adds. "He's…just being an idiot."

"Well. I promise he has nothing to worry about. None of us turned into assassins overnight." He brushes a bit of hair out of his face. "We mostly just got old."

It gets another smile, and that's sort of sweet. Here in the quiet, the fact that he doesn't really know Pete that well seems bigger, or brighter, or in sharper focus. Even so, _sweet_ feels like the right word for him. Pete cuts him a glance that's either almost shy or almost sheepish. 

Yes, actually. Very sweet.

"Am I crashing your night if I hang out for a little bit?" Pete asks. "Is that weird? That's definitely too weird, right?"

"You're cool. I was just gonna look at the rest of Gee's stuff—"

Pete's knee cracks a little as he gets to his feet. "No, really. I can go, I'm sorry."

"Pete." The line of Pete's shoulders goes tense, and Ray nods to the couch. "I'm serious. Hang out."

He drops back down, shoulders suddenly sagging, and it's like the whole room sags with him, boneless with relief.

"Sorry," he says again. "I'm rooming with Patrick and he's…"

"Still touchy?"

That smile comes back, almost reaching Pete's eyes. "He's such a fucking princess, you have no idea. I just…needed a minute, I guess. And your boy's down with Joe and Hurley—something about Mortal Kombat?"

 _Your boy._ Frank, Ray realizes. That sounds about right.

"So…here I am," Pete continues, dropping his gaze to his lap. "I was gonna go for a walk, but then I didn't? I dunno. I'm rambling though, so that's probably good."

Ray laughs and flicks a few new pages out of Gerard's monstrous folder. "Here." The papers warble a little as he passes them to Pete. "Help me come up with some useful constructive criticism."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, I mean—you can watch TV or something if you'd rather."

Pete, huddled on the couch, gives Ray a soft, open look that tips the world just a little off-kilter. He reminds Ray of Gerard, somehow. Suddenly vulnerable; sincere when you're paying enough attention. 

"No," Pete answers. "I just…like? Will he care? Gerard. If it's first draft stuff, maybe he doesn't—"

"It's okay," Ray promises, because it is. Gerard hands out half his noodling little portrait studies to anyone who's interested. _Art for art's sake, you know what I mean?_ "I'm keeping the important stuff secret."

Pete blinks once and there's an awkward bleat of silence. And then he appears to catch up.

"Uh. Sorry. Right."

And he takes the pages out of Ray's hand. 

It's quiet for a while. Pete's meticulous in his consideration of the different sketches, tilting his head this way and that, and settling the pages into different, deliberate piles. His mouth puckers a little when he's concentrating. Ray notices this, and then goes back to peering at a half-typed, half-hand-scrawled set of notes that Gerard definitely spilled coffee on. 

Pete makes a soft sound.

"What?" Ray asks, glancing up.

A small shake of the head. Pete lays the last of his pages face down on one of the piles. 

"Nothing. I was just thinking. I used to be so intimidated by you guys."

"Us?"

"You and Gerard."

Ray blinks. "…have you _met_ us?"

"Yeah, dude, that's why." Pete picks one of the piles up and taps it against his thigh, until all the pages and their edges are neatly in line. "You guys are legit."

"I'm pretty sure I could find one or two kids in an arena tomorrow night who think you're legit."

"Yeah, you could. We're good at what we do." Pete passes the pile back to Ray. "And I have a lot of ideas or concepts or—whatever—and we pull them off. But you two have, like. _Vision_."

Ray's cheeks go hot. "Gerard has vision. I just wear what he tells me to."

"Sure. That's the replicant pile." Pete nods at the papers. 

"Replicant?"

"Yeah like—the robots in _Blade Runner_? Dude."

"I know what replicants are," Ray clarifies. "But…"

"Those ones make me think of replicants." Pete shrugs. "Or, like things pretending to be other things. I put them in order starting with the ones I like best." 

Ray flips through the pages and a few men and women, all of them with sharp eyes or goggles or sunglasses of varying sizes glare back at him. He smiles a little.

"You do have vision," Pete insists into the brief lull of quiet. "You know Joe hasn't shut the fuck up about you for like a week straight?"

"I bet he'd be glad you're telling me."

"Whatever," Pete waves a hand. "You guys got up there and did your thing. Every time. And you still do. It's awesome."

Ray shrugs, his face hot again. He isn't sure why—it's not like he's new at this, or new to hearing people say he's good at something. But Pete grins big.

"You're a cool dude, Toro." 

"I try."

It makes Pete whisper one small, real laugh. He picks up another pile. 

"Gerard really likes bright colors, huh?"

"Just a little."

Another laugh. And after that, quiet, except for Pete's occasional remarks on this sketch or that one, or his soft requests for new pages, if Ray has any to share. Almost two hours drift by before Pete glances at his phone and sighs. 

"I should go…lay down, or something."

Ray wonders if Frank plans on just passing out in Andy and Joe's room. It's not impossible. But he unfolds himself from the bed to walk Pete to the door. The brass handle is cool when he grips it, and the locklatch clicks, and then they're both facing the open hallway, all mauve and softly lit. It's pretty ugly, in Ray's opinion.

"It's not just empty flattery, you know," Pete says out of nowhere. 

"What?"

"About you and Gerard. I'm not just saying it to be nice."

"Um." 

Ray knows he should have a more eloquent answer than that—a 'thank you' at the very least—but sometimes life isn't that generous. Here in the twilight of his youth, he's getting a little bit more okay with that, too. Pete doesn't appear to care either way.

"Mikey used to say it, too," he adds softly. His dark eyes watch for something down the hallway that isn't there. "He told me you and Gerard could make him believe in anything."

Ray doesn't even have an _um_ for that one. Pete, like he's suddenly remembering where he is, blinks once and looks at Ray. The corner of his mouth quirks up, and it's a thin, self-deprecating shadow of an expression. 

"Man, I'm batting a thousand tonight." He rolls his eyes at himself. "I'm not this much of an asshole all the time, I promise. Or I am. But normally I wait til you like me a little bit better."

"I pretty frequently cohabitate with Frank Iero. You'd have to be a truly _magnificent_ jackass to run me off."

Pete's grin crackles back to life, a major chord pulled out of static noise. "Well in that case, watch your back, Toro."

"Have a good night, Pete."

"You too."

*

He does, the next day, ask Mikey about Patrick. Or about Patrick in the diner. Or just…about any of it, really—it's just that Patrick's the easiest entry point.

They're alone in the dressing room together, mirrors paneling the walls on three sides. Labyrinthine infinities bound them everywhere except the door, and Mikey looks a little grey in the room's bad lighting. He casts his gaze away from Ray and says _nothing happened_. 

"It's just…" He rubs the back of his neck and sighs. "I was hanging out with Frank and them before they went to some bar. I think Patrick thinks there's some kind of bad blood between me and Pete."

He shrugs the rest of the way into his stage shirt and it tugs his hair into a weird rumple. Ray reaches out to smooth it down. He can remember a time when he wouldn't have gotten even that much answer out of Mikey.

Mikey just leans into his touch, until Ray's half-hugging him.

"Is there?" Ray asks.

Mikey shakes his head. "I don't think so." 

_Then what?_ Ray wants to ask, but a tech taps on the door, announces that they've got ten minutes, and just like that, Ray has to let Mikey go.

*

One week later, they're closing the show—which means Ray gets to stand in the wings with Gerard and watch at least the opening of Fall Out Boy's set. Gerard, already done up with lip balm and eyeshadow that appears to be infused with glow-in-the-dark glitter, bounces on his feet while Patrick prowls up and down the stage to 'I Don't Care'. Ray catches him mouthing a few of the lyrics and bumps his shoulder.

Gerard leans into it, warm against Ray's side. He's like Mikey that way.

"He's cute," Gerard shouts over the music. 

"Patrick?"

"Joe." 

Joe's closest to them, his hair catching the dazzle of the stage lights. He looks like he was born to be there. Not necessarily rock-famous—just there, making music. Ray smiles a little.

"You gonna invite him over for dinner with Lindsey?"

Gerard snorts (not a no, then) and goes back to singing along.

On the far stage left, Pete catches Ray's eye. Unlike Patrick, who bursts into moments of cute, funny dance, or Joe, who tosses his head back, carried away while his fingers fly, Pete ventures as close to the edge of the stage as possible. The kids at the barrier scream and seethe in a tidal pull, hands outstretched, reaching for his gravity. Ray muses at how stunning it looks from the sidelines, all those people trying to catch something sacred; felt, but never seen. He never quite notices it when he's _in it_.

Pete bursts into a smile, singing back to the kids shrieking for him.

Ray gives Gerard's hair a kiss. Andy's leviathan rhythm fills him up, pelvic cradle to collarbones—and even through that, he feels how Gerard hums like he's happy.

After the show, there're some kids hanging around the bus lots. Frank, Gerard, Patrick, and Joe go off to greet them, probably because they're better people than Ray. His knees just ache and he wants to sit. 

Without Frank, his bus is dim and cool and blessedly quiet. He digs a beer out of the minifridge and decides to spend a minute or twenty contemplating the ceiling over the couch. It's nice to stretch a little. 

Maybe it's something to do with the way long-haul touring builds weird, connective tissues between people ( _Blood brothers_ , Gerard singsonged one time—and really. Ray's going to have to start teasing him about his nascent obsession with Pete's lyrics); maybe it's just that it's easier to think of Pete as a friend, after that night in the hotel, and a few evenings spent drinking with him and Joe and Frank—either way, Pete doesn't even knock this time. The bus door swishes in, quiet over carpeting. 

"Sleeping already?" The corners of Pete's eyes crinkle, even though he isn't quite smiling.

This time, it's well past 10 p.m.. It's almost _1 a.m._. Ray's starting to think that maybe Pete lives in a not-quite-parallel dimension, where time moves differently. Relativity or something. He read about that once.

"Just worn out," he answers. 

"So you're staring at the ceiling?"

"What do _you_ do when you're worn out?"

"I dunno. Run? Or something."

Ray's mouth twists. "You _run_ when you're tired?"

"To get more tired, sometimes. Yeah." He taps his temple, his eyes flicking briefly wide. "It helps distract me from the voices."

Ray stares and Pete's face does…something. 

"I'm _kidding_ dude, I'm just bad at sleeping."

Ray scratches the day-old stubble on the side of his face, feeling looser than he did a second ago, but a little more embarrassed. "Oh."

Pete tucks his hands into his pockets. "Am I interrupting your…ceiling time?"

Pete, Ray's coming to realize, is an incredible weirdo. 

"No, we'll catch up later. You want a beer?"

This time, Pete does smile, and the corners of his eyes crinkle again, and Ray thinks the same thing he's thought every time he's seen that smile before. Sweet.

"Yeah," Pete tells him. "Thanks."

While they're nursing their drinks, Pete tells him that _he_ was planning on rewatching _Terminator 2_ while he waited for Patrick, and he doesn't want to be a pain in the ass. They really can drink in silence, if Ray just wants to chill.

"I like quiet," Pete tells him. "I just—it's nice to be quiet with someone."

Ray understands that. He's lost count of how many moments he's spent in quiet presence with Gerard; in hotel rooms, in their shitty old van, in Gerard's studio or his own. He nods and Pete takes a pull off his beer.

They aren't all that quiet in the end. They talk about touring for a little while, and how it makes you feel like an alien. They talk about missing home, too. They land, finally, on making music, and believing in their own music, and not equivocating.

Or, Pete doesn't equivocate.

"I guess I don't think about it," Ray admits, contemplating the lip of his beer bottle. "Not when I start writing. I just do it." He tilts his head, swallowing a smile. "After that, I'm just stubborn."

"It's working, whatever you're doing." Pete sinks back, into the cushions of the couch. "It makes for a killer show."

"High praise, coming from the reigning king of arena rock."

Pete's laugh is soft and short. "I'm not the reigning king of anything. Except bullshit, maybe. I got us shot out of the stage for a whole tour for no fucking reason." Another small laugh. "You guys, like, color coordinate."

"Like a boy band."

Pete elbows Ray's side. "You do shit with intention. Hair dye and fucking makeup—but you _mean_ it."

"I know," Ray smiles. "I'm being a dick. Thank you, really."

Pete tips his beer bottle in a little salute and they lapse back into silence. Ray catches the rhythm of Pete's breathing and chases it, thinking up a little backing beat matched to the way Pete's soft, indrawn breaths syncopate with his own.

"People used to give me shit for the eyeliner," Pete says eventually.

 _He's_ the one staring at the ceiling now, his head dropped back against the couch cushions. There's a high-frequency tension that came in with him, twisted up tight, that flows away now. He looks a little softer against the cushions. Ray just waits.

"I don't remember why I started doing it," Pete murmurs. "But other dudes got so fucking pissed, I decided they could kiss my ass—and kept it up. Everyone called shit _gay_ all the time, and I always figured there'd be some kid out there who just wanted to put on makeup or whatever because he liked it. So I did it, like, hoping it would help." He taps the mouth of his bottle against his sternum in a small, quiet motion. "Like guyliner makes that big a difference," he snorts. "It probably would've, if I'd gone full David Bowie."

"There's still time," Ray teases. 

Pete lolls his head to one side to look at Ray. "Nah, it'd look stupid if I did it. It's not really me." He isn't smiling, but his mouth curves in a way that matches the softness of the rest of him. "But if I'd seen more of it when I was a kid? I think it would've just…helped, somehow. Like if I was a kid and saw someone in the hardcore scene doing what Gerard does. I wish I had, I guess. It just would've made shit easier."

It isn't fair that Ray thinks of Mikey, who's been living and breathing in his brother's orbit for their entire lives. It isn't fair—maybe to Mikey, and maybe to Pete, too—that he tastes _not as easy as you think_ on the back of his tongue. It probably is at least a little fair that he doesn't say that part out loud.

Instead, he stretches, something in his back cracking. Pete watches him with big, dark eyes. A cottoned ease settles over everything for a moment, and when Ray doesn't really answer, Pete shrugs and goes back to considering his beer bottle. 

"It's cool that he does it."

The soft click of the door's latch pops silvery through the air. The door swings open, and Frank stomps in, a handfull of envelopes and small, hand-crafted gifts clutched close.

"Are you stealing my beer, Wentz?" he grins. 

"All of it." Pete gets to his feet and drains whatever's left in his bottle. Then he lets it dangle, easy, nocked between two fingers. "You guys all done out there?"

"Yeah. Patrick has like five letters for you."

"Well. I'd better get to reading them." He tips his head, eyes glittering. "Have a good night, guys."

They send him off with goodbyes and not long after that the bus hums to life. Ray crawls into his bunk. Somewhere that he can't see, the world strobes by, nothing but nighttime and highway lights. He falls asleep, feeling it in his bones.

*

The days and miles go glowing past.

In the weird no-space that belongs only to them, folded up into the shapes of buses and bunks and hotels, and the occasional off-days, they all grow to know each other in a way they never could before, not even during Warped. 

Something flourishes. Patrick eases up around Mikey and Mikey eases up in general. There's more than one night that Mikey joins them, sitting around to drink and shoot the shit, a sparkling water in hand. And even if he's a little stiff in the shoulders, he does smile more, and he laughs (and agrees) when Pete posits that David Lynch really would have been the ideal director for all three of the original Star Wars. And something sad becomes less deep and less permanent in Ray's chest.

And Pete? Becomes a permeating happiness—less a mystery, and more the dazzle of a chromatic run in Ray's head. _Everpresent_ , he remembers thinking, a decade ago. But anything other than flat. He was right, it turns out.

It takes him a few weeks to realize what this is.

On one particular evening, with all of them descended on a vegan bar, Ray dredges up the name for it. At the far end of the table, Pete barks a laugh, crying bullshit on the game that he and Frank and Joe appear to have just invented—guessing movies going solely by their Amazon reviews. Pete's smile lights up his whole face. A few seats down, Mikey watches him, the corner of his mouth upturned.

Gerard just chuckles at them and rests his head on Ray's shoulder, and his hair smells faintly of soap. And Mikey tips his head, still watching Pete, and Pete, who doesn't notice, incandesces because he's happy. Because bodies glow when they're happy.

Yes, Ray thinks, there's a word for this. _Fondness_ —its clearwater feeling stirring in his chest.

*

Pete finds him a few more times, on hotel nights or after shows, when neither one of them is out, taking pictures with the kids that linger.

He lights up once, in the back lounge of Ray's bus, peering at the different tracks and levels on Ray's laptop screen. 

"Can I hear it?" he asks.

Ray shrugs, because it isn't really anything to hear, just his idle thinking, bright skitters of sound that almost make something. But he passes Pete his headphones and taps the spacebar anyway. Pete bounces one foot, his eyes gone glassy while the music puffs in muffled bleats from beneath the headphones. He smiles his bigbright smile at the end of the track, letting the headphones slip to settle around his neck.

"Dude," he says. "What the hell. That's just you _thinking_?"

Ray shrugs. "Yeah? I just have to get it out."

"Man. You're like Patrick."

"Is that a good thing?"

Pete's smile softens into something Ray can't quite name. "Yeah," he promises. "It's a good thing."

Ray supposes that most people would say Pete's acting like he has a crush— _Ray_ would probably say that, if he cared. But he decides he doesn't, and it's really not his business what crushes Pete may or may not harbor unless he wants to share them. They relax into each others' company and the tour carries on. 

Until a night in Boston, in the bustle of the green room after the show. Pete darts up to him, sweaty and grinning and high on the thing that keeps them all coming back for this, again, and again, and again.

"I gotta go shower," he says, catching Ray's arm, "but—humor me for a second?"

Ray's hair feels like a wet sweater, dripping sweat down the back of his neck. "Sure?"

"Here." Pete presses a sticky, beat-up notebook into his hands. "I…it's just some stuff I wrote. Will you mess around with it? Like. If you wanna. I want to see where you go with it."

Ray blinks, the notebook cover slippery against his damp fingers. "Okay? If you're sure."

"Yeah, I'm sure." Pete's eyes are so bright, and he moves for one second like he's going to hug Ray maybe, but then thinks the better of it. He squeezes Ray's shoulder instead. "Thanks, man."

Ray barely gets a chance to say _no problem_ before Pete's gone, dashing after Joe and shouting that he had first dibs on the shower.

There's _poetry_ in the book—or, some kind of free-form stream of consciousness approaching poetry. It feels strange, sitting in the back lounge and flipping through the pages, seeing how Pete's handwriting skitters and burbles over the page. Private. That's the word. He twists until he can sprawl out on the couch, and lets the notebook lay open on his chest. 

He thinks about Gerard, hugging a Taylor. He thinks about Pete, his arm around Mikey, leading him off to a place where no one else could see.

*

The words—the poetry, the lyrics, whatever—make a tangle. On the page and in Ray's head. It fills him up, an itchy black webbing, and he picks at it and twists it, and never finds a thread to pull loose.

For a few days, he wonders how Patrick does it. And for another few days, he wonders if there's a deadline on this—if at some point Pete will think he gave up. Or maybe just want the notebook back.

He never gets an answer to any of those things. He does get something else, though.

It's absolutely pouring at the end of their set. Gerard sends all the kids home, blowing kisses and shouting for them to get where they're going safely. _The world still needs you._

Ray's best friend, everybody.

He peels out of his stage clothes and rinses off, going for the back door at a half-jog in an attempt to gear up for the actual dash through the rain. He tugs the heavy door open and almost walks right into Mikey, standing under the overhang.

Or. Mikey and Pete. Mikey startles. Pete closes his mouth, the last syllables of a word Ray didn't hear dying under the drum of the rain. They aren't standing all that close, or even doing anything worth looking guilty over, but Mikey tugs a hand through his hair and takes one step further back from Pete.

"Sorry," he says, and Ray can't parse which of them he's apologizing to, or for what reason. He manages a tired smile in Ray's direction. But when he looks back at Pete, it's gone, slipped off into something pallid and sad. "I'll see you later," Mikey tells Pete.

And just like that, he goes, not even hunching against the rain.

Ray watches Pete watch Mikey's retreating back. The rain comes down in a splatting rumble. Pete looks like he might never move again.

"Hey," Ray says—and this time Pete flinches.

He looks at Ray, wrung-out and tired, and wraps his arms around himself. "Hey." The smile he offers is too much like Mikey's—a sodden rag of a thing, entirely joyless.

It's all he has to give, apparently. Without any parting words, he ducks out into the storm. He leaves a bubble of quiet in his wake, shaped around the suggestion of something shattered.

*

Two days later, Ray returns to the notebook. All those tangled words, they catch on his ribs. He mouths them and they snag in his soft palette, too filled up with spikey little letters.

But in the thicket, his thumb slips over _sunshine riptide_.

A thread pulled, like a rope around an ankle. Not an unraveling—Pete's not Gerard. Just a giving in. Or a going under.

He reaches for the cheap Fender bass he keeps in the back lounge, and chases the kind of heartbreak that drags you to the bottom.

*

There's a little bit of melody in the damp and nascent armature that he lays down. There could be more—but Pete's a bassist. The silver, meandering suggestion of the melody is enough. The kind of thing he could build on; that leaves room for the imagination. Something you could weave through the rhythm section if you really wanted—a sinking under, and a coming back up. Over and over again But he steadies the bassline for Pete.

Three mornings later, he taps on the door to Pete's bus before letting himself in. 

Pete blinks up at him from the couch, eyes red-ringed either from having just woken up or from not having gone to sleep.

"Toro." 

His voice croaks, and Ray wonders what Pete was doing just before he stepped through the door. Staring at the ceiling, maybe. Ray holds up his laptop and the notebook, one atop the other.

"I have something to show you."

It's a weird, watery morning hour, and Pete looks like a skinny wring of a thing in the pearly whisper of the light, but he perks up, a quiet happiness ghosting over his face, almost suggesting a smile. He unfolds himself from the couch.

"You're like the best part of waking up, dude. Right this way."

The back lounge on Pete's bus looks mostly like the studio on Ray's own—maybe just upholstered differently. Pete lets the door back to the bunks close, shutting out the soft sounds of Patrick's snoring with a click. 

"My humble place of business." Pete makes a broad gesture. "Make yourself comfortable."

He's in nothing more than soft pajama bottoms and a hoodie only zipped up halfway, Ray notices. Under the cotton and the twisting ink of his tattoo, his collarbones stand out, high wings, close to the skin. Ray has the abrupt impulse to zip the hoodie all the way up and turn him around. Push him back to the bunks, so he'll lay down and sleep. 

He just sets the laptop down on the couch and sits. 

"I need your bass." 

Pete moves like he's on autopilot, drifting to grab what Ray asks for, but in a slow, imprecise way. A flashback to Mikey, and then an earlier flashback to Gerard, tugs Ray's heartbeat up a notch. What did he do, what did he take—

He sucks in a deep breath. 

Not everyone's a recovered addict. It's so easy to forget that sometimes. 

Pete passes him the bass, then shuffles to sit, leaving a weird amount of not-enough-distance between them. He picks the cuffs of his hoodie over his hands. Ray wonders if he's cold. 

"I can come back later if you're tired," he offers.

"No, it's okay." Pete cracks his neck. "I'm tired but I'm not sleeping anytime soon." That ghost of a smile comes back. "I was just reading about bolt guns before you got here."

"About…what?"

"The things they kill cows with." Pete presses two fingers to his forehead. "No bullets, just. A bolt thing."

So not staring at the ceiling. Cool.

"You should hang out with Gerard more," Ray says, pulling up the tracks for the skinny little breath of a melody and the meter of a drumkit. "He's down with weird shit like that."

"I'll tell him he comes highly recommended."

Ray cuts him a small smile, and taps the audio files to life. Without an amp, the bass _thwangs_ a little under Ray's hands, but that's nothing new. He tracked only a minute and a half of an idea of a song—it's easy to ignore the imperfections of what's not even in the production stage and just find the slipping shape of a drowsy, staccatoed homeostasis. When the melody runs out, he keeps going, wandering with the rhythm for a little bit longer, seeing where it takes them. 

Pete stares.

"That bad?" Ray laughs, letting his hands come to a rest.

"No, dude—what? It was awesome."

"It's just me thinking."

"Yeah, you said that last time. Can I try?"

"It's your bass, man."

Pete thwaps the backs of his knuckles at Ray's shoulder, but there's no sting to it. He takes the bass happily. Ray resets the tracks without Pete asking. 

Pete makes a go of repeating what Ray just demonstrated, and it's elegant and stumbling all at once. His right hand slips up and down the neck with a grace that startles Ray—and then makes sudden sense. He has smaller hands than Ray. And Mikey. His fingers dance a little bit like light on water to make up for the difference. His mouth puckers again, the same as that night in the hotel, all concentration. 

It doesn't surprise Ray that he trips here and there—he only heard the line _once_ —but the weird little flights he improvs to make up for what he didn't catch or can't remember catch Ray off guard. It's not that he thought Pete was a _bad_ bassist. It's just that he…hadn't thought much about it at all. Excepting the weird feeling he could never shake that there was something in all those old basslines that didn't feel quite like Pete. 

Pete's fingers press white at the tips. He finds his steps, and the morning fills itself out, more real than before.

The melody runs its course. 

At the end, Pete looks up, the press of his mouth softening, all of a sudden gently bashful. 

"I…probably need to hear it a few more times."

It's the kind of line that could sound—well. Like a _line_. A bad come-on in a kind of dumb meetcute. But it doesn't. In the slow outpouring of the morning, it reminds Ray of Gerard again, sharing the fragile parts of himself and trusting someone to take care. He smiles. 

"I think you mostly got it." 

Pete tips his head. "Yeah. But it sounded better when you did it." 

It _is_ a line this time, and Ray grins. "You're a shit, you know that?"

"Hurley tells me, like. On the daily." Pete presses the bass into Ray's hands. "C'mon, dude, I haven't even had coffee yet. Give me this before the caffeine withdrawal kills me."

"Or we could just get coffee."

Pete's fingers slip over his. "After this?"

Ray can't tell if the epic puppydog face is on purpose or not, but he takes the bass, and runs through the line one more time. Slower on this go, and without the melody. He can feel Pete watching, catches how he's got his bottom lip gathered between his teeth, focused. He's quiet when Ray carries them through to the end, and he stays quiet, and suddenly Ray feels awkward.

"I haven't figured the lyrics out, yet," he says, spreading his hand open over the strings. "This is just. How they feel."

Pete nods, slowly. "Like a movie soundtrack." 

"If you wanna to think about it like that, sure."

"Sweet." 

Pete's lip is bitten a little pink, but that doesn't stop him from smiling. For half a minute, it's not so awkward anymore. 

"You still need that coffee?" Ray smiles, moving to stand.

But Pete's fingers curl around his wrist and he's caught in a weird crouch. The bass almost slips out of his hands—he knocks Pete's shoulder in the dodge to catch it. Pete flinches away.

"Fuck, sorry—sorry," Pete winces. 

"No, it's okay." Ray straightens up, careful not to smack Pete in the face with the headstock. 

Pete drags a hand over his face. "Jesus." He lets his head fall back, hiding his eyes in the crook of his arm. "I'm such a fucking idiot." 

Ray also feels like an idiot—or maybe like a jackass—standing over him, just holding onto the bass. He sets the bass aside, neatly. Pete peeks out at him when he settles back down and the couch cushions shift.

"Does it make it better if I tell you I'm still getting the hang of this?" Pete asks. 

"The hang of…?" Ray figures it's better not to presume. He also quietly bids goodbye to those thirty seconds of not-awkward.

"Talking to guys?"

"You've kind of _been_ talking to me—didn't you notice?"

That makes Pete laugh a little, even if it's hollow. Better than nothing. He lets his arm falls away from his face, and then he's just looking at Ray, his cheek rested on the cushioned back of the couch. 

"Yeah, but you're like the first—after. Mikey…" He looks up at the ceiling again, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes. "Oh my _god_ , because it's a great idea to shit where you eat. What the fuck, Wentz."

"Pete—"

"You can totally just lock me in here to die, if you want—"

" _Pete_."

Pete drops his hands, just staring up into the morning light. "I'm sorry." He exhales, long and slow, through his nose. "I'm an idiot."

The light makes him look so thin in that hoodie, and this is the second time in under two minutes that he's called himself an idiot. Ray fights the resurgent urge to wrap him in something warm and soothe him somehow, the way he might have if this were Mikey. Which, speaking of—

"It's just," Pete starts. "Just. You know how you think you're over something, and then ten years later it's like, no, joke's on you?"

Some bit of flesh strips itself off of Ray's heart. Pete slouches with supine hands on the couch, apparently intent on having this conversation with the air above his head. 

"I just miss him," he says softly. "I didn't think I did—but. We used to be friends. I miss that part." He tilts his head to look at Ray one more time. "I don't want to stop being friends with you, too." 

Ray slips his hand to rest his fingers over Pete's. 

"I think we're okay," he says. Pete's big-eyed, hopeless look is enough to make Ray notch their fingers together. "Really."

"You're really not a rebound thing, or whatever," Pete murmurs. "Like I _like_ you."

Ray feels a little bit overcome, like he's standing on a very high ledge and only just became aware of exactly how far the drop might be. "I like you too," he promises, because that's true. Whatever else, that's so very, very true. How surprising. "Maybe I'm not…the right guy for you…but I like you."

Pete makes a small, miserable noise. Ray tugs his hand, til he's close enough to hug, his cheek warm against Ray's collarbone. 

"Megs knows," Pete murmurs. "I'm not just running around sleeping with guys on the DL or anything. I mean—I'm not sleeping with any guys at all. But she knows." He doesn't move to get out of Ray's hold, so Ray doesn't let him go. He's used to this part. Pete breathes in and breathes out. "She's the only person I ever really told. Out loud."

"Meagan?"

"Yeah. She doesn't care. No one _cares_ —like Hurley just knows, he doesn't give a fuck—but Meagan…" Pete sighs. "She just told me to stay safe, if I ever wanted to do anything about it."

Fresh hurt springs in Ray's chest. Pete's so thin and warm against him, and flirting was fun, for however long it went on. It could still be fun, because flirting's just flirting. Flirting doesn't end in people getting hurt.

Ray wishes for one selfish moment that everything were different. And then he pulls away. 

"You never told anyone else?"

"Who else would I tell?" Pete leans forward, elbows perched on his knees. He rubs at his eyes again, like he's trying to clear away the sticky afterimage of a bad dream. "My dick's already all over the internet, and I had a marriage fall apart. I don't need some jackass coming after Meagan about how she's my beard—I love her. I love her so much."

It dawns on Ray that Pete's famous in a way he himself isn't. Maybe not an A-list celebrity, but famous enough that shit like that would even cross his mind. A body, and all its human dignity, subject to to the meanness of public scrutiny. The unfairness of it stings where his heart already hurts, and he wishes everything were different all over again, but for a new reason this time.

"Hey," he says softly. "It's okay." It isn't. Not in the broader picture. But this part is. "It's not like I ever told the whole world." He tries for a smile. It's harder than he wishes it were, but he gets there. "And you've got my number—it's not like we can't _talk_ , if you need to." 

Pete glances at him, sunken and miserable and grateful all at once.

"Are you volunteering?"

"For what?"

"To be my sherpa up the mountain of gayness?"

Ray stares for a second before he gets it. Then he laughs. For real. 

"I don't know if gay is a _mountain_. You'd have to check in with a gay guy to be sure."

"True." Pete finally cracks a smile, thin and fragile as dawnlight, but a smile nonetheless. He nods to his bass, settled in the corner not unlike a strange, long-necked sentinel. "Will you record that line for me? I want to listen to it some more."

"Soon as I get back to my bus, sure." 

Ray gets to his feet and Pete doesn't reach for him this time. He stays hunched in on himself, not quite looking at Ray or at anything else. Pain screws itself tight inside Ray's chest.

 _You know,_ Gerard told him once, _you gotta let some shit go. You can't fix everything for everyone._

That's true. He knows that. He doesn't fight it so much anymore. 

But he can still make it hurt a little less.

"Hey," he offers. "Still want to help me find that coffee?"

Pete glances up at him, eyes catching a long wing of sunlight. It turns his irises to something hyaline—a bright color Ray can't quite pin down. Not without serious consideration. Pete's smile is a little bit richer on this go-round. The corners of his eyes crinkle.

"Yeah," he says softly. "Let me get dressed."

It's very sunny when they end up stepping off the bus. Pete still looks tired, but a little more buoyant. Good, Ray thinks. That's good. The sunshine, and the soft laughs, and the flat concrete sidewalk, guiding them in the direction of something easy and banal, like Starbucks.

It's good. 

It's good for this reason, if no other: some heartbreaks are just heartbreaks, and there's nothing to do but wait for them to heal.

*

The deepest heartbreak, of course—the one for which there's neither words nor music—is Mikey.

Mikey who, on another hotel night, switches with Frank so he can share a room with Ray.

Mikey, who sits on the edge of his bed, and picks at his nails and gives Ray a fragmented explanation of what happened however many nights ago out in the rain. 

It's not that he and Pete had a fight. 

It's not even that he wants to fight. 

It's the opposite problem. 

"I don't ever know what to say to him," Mikey confesses. "It's like I never had anything to say in the first place."

Ray listens, because he always listens, even if he's sometimes worried that this runaround, this years-long self-imposed suffering, is going to drag Mikey back down to rock bottom. He listens, because what else can he do at this point. He and Gerard, between them, have said everything there is to say to Mikey. 

He listens, and so of course comes the inevitable admission:

"It just sucks. We were friends once, and now, when it's just us, I don't know what to do. I…" His voice breaks a bit. "It's like it was with Alicia."

And there's nothing to say to that at all.

The mattress creaks when Ray sits beside Mikey. When he gets his arms around Mikey, Mikey pushes his face into Ray's shoulder. For the first time in a very long time, his breath catches, pops, and doesn't come back smooth. Ray just holds him tight and lets him cry.


End file.
